![]() MTM had a few of the more interesting acts of the time, such as Foster and Lloyd, of whom the latter was my dear friend, and Rick’s as well. He had started in Nashville back in the mid-1980s when Mary Tyler Moore’s production outfit branched out into music. A glance at his history showed a truly promising variety - Rick had recorded or mixed Johnny Cash, Junior Brown, Tim Finn, No Doubt, and Nine Inch Nails assisted Don Gehman and T Bone Burnett produced Amy Correia and Joseph Arthur was himself in some sort of a metal band. He didn’t think he was the right person for my project, or maybe I didn’t, I can’t recall but he mentioned Rick’s name. Jay is now a prominent mainstream producer at the time he was in a noisy and fun band called Iodine, and was a respected figure in an outsider-ish Southern scene. In March that year I had dinner with Jay Joyce in Nashville. For various reasons nothing was working out. ![]() I went through one candidate after another, upwards of 100 of them. I understood this rationale totally, and even halfway understood why they didn’t want me working with the engineers from my previous two records, but that restriction made for more of a challenge than I anticipated. I had just stepped up from the indies to the majors, and my company’s non-negotiable demand was that I collaborate with a “producer” - someone with an approved résumé and an established history of delivering commercially plausible recordings within a modest budget. I met him after many long, tiresome months of scouting candidates for the job. ![]() Rick engineered and co-produced my third solo record ( Let’s Kill Saturday Night), back in 1998. Because his high intelligence and competencies were overlaid with stoner mannerisms and some pointlessly profane antics, one was sometimes unsure whether to revel in his company, learn from his wisdom, or fear for his health but two out of three were blessings he extruded wherever he went, and the third was something inscrutable, his private thing with which to struggle. He was a lavishly gifted audio engineer and a delightfully odd duck. Although you should repress the urge to write an essay every time someone dies, I can’t resist putting something out there about my friend Rick Will. ![]()
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